Glass containers are typically formed by forcing gas into the interior of a parison of semimolten glass in a mold. The glass parison expands against the interior surfaces of the mold to form a bottom, and a sidewall with an annular rim defining an opening of the container. During the forming process, various types of defects may be formed, some of which require the container to be rejected. At first, containers were manually inspected by the human eye, but this method proved to be costly, time consuming and inaccurate. Thus, automatic inspection devices were employed in order to reduce the inspection cost and increase the reliability of the inspection process. A typical U.S. Pat. No. 4,066,363 granted Jan. 3, 1978, to J. W. Juvinall, and assigned to the assignee of the present invention, was designed to detect refractive defects and, more specifically, ribbon tear defects. A ribbon tear defect has at least a portion thereof defined by a pair of indentations running generally parallel along the outside surface of the sidewall of the container and a corresponding concavity between the indentations running along the inside surface of the sidewall of the container. The inspection device identifies ribbon tear defects by sensing light refracted by the concavity of the ribbon tear. However, the inspection device is incapable of detecting transverse ribbon tear defects, i.e., those defects running perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the glass container because of the configuration of the optics associated with the device. Such inspection devices provide a signal to reject a glass container only upon the detection of a refractive defect having a longitudinal component. Therefore, a predominantly transverse defect would not be detected by existing inspection devices.